Albion Fellows Bacon

• Albion Bacon
• Born: April 8, 1865
• Died: December 10, 1933

Housing reformer, was the youngest of four daughters born to Albion Fellows and Mary (Erskine) Fellows. She was born in Evansville, Indiana, several weeks after the death of her father, a Methodist minister. Mary Fellows raised her children in her hometown, McCutchanville, a small hamlet near Evansville that had been settled by Scotch-Irish immigrants. Albion Fellows grew to womanhood in this picturesque community of strongly religious farmers who took seriously the duty of helping their neighbors. This environment had a lasting influence on her.

Family finances dashed her hopes to attend college. After completing her education at Evansville High School, she became a secretary for her great-uncle, a judge. Five years later, on October 11, 1888, she married Hilary Edwin Bacon, an older local retailer and banker. Their family grew to include three daughters and a son. During the early years of her marriage, Albion Bacon played the role of a fairly conventional middle-class housewife, devoting herself to the care of her family. She painted and wrote poetry, along with other creative endeavors, exercising a strong esthetic bent that had developed during her childhood. After one of her children was taken ill, she fell sick and remained debilitated for eight years. She returned to activity, however, around 1900 when two of her other children contracted scarlet fever.

Bacon developed an interest in social conditions as a result of her belief that the children had been exposed to their illness at school. She joined a community sanitation committee, visited the needy for Evansville’s associated charities, and organized a number of community services. Gradually she came to believe that poor people’s housing was a root of the disease, vice, and crime with which she had become familiar. She was also greatly influenced by Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, with its description of squalid slum conditions in New York City. Slums, she came to believe, were not limited to metropolitan areas; similar conditions existed in Evansville and even smaller cities and towns throughout the nation. Squalid housing, she concluded, was intolerable, for it not only blighted the lives of the poor but endangered the health and safety of the entire community. She was persuaded that laws had to be enacted to combat the problem.

Bacon first unsuccessfully attempted to get such regulations included in a new Evansville building code. Undaunted, she began to organize a campaign for adoption of a statewide housing code by the Indiana legislature. Consulting experts in the field, she was especially influenced by Lawrence Veiller (who had written the New York State Tenement House Law of 1901). By 1908 Bacon had drawn up a proposal that she hoped the public would support.

Bacon did find backing among charitable and business groups, but was alarmed by their insistence that she remain leader of the cause. Influential organizations, like the Commercial Club of Indianapolis, were willing to support her proposal on condition that she guide it through the legislature. Out of necessity, and with familial support, Bacon took up the role that had fallen to her. She captured the public’s attention, publicizing in every possible forum the housing conditions requiring elimination. She also managed the cause in the legislature, a once overwhelming challenge that she rose to meet. In 1909 a housing law was approved, though it applied only to the cities of Indianapolis and Evansville.

As a pragmatist Bacon took satisfaction in this law as a good beginning but was determined to get an effective, statewide measure enacted; so she intensified her efforts to organize greater support. During 1911 she became chairman of the housing committee of the State Federation of Women’s Clubs and worked with this organization for the legislation she desired. That year she also aided establishment of the Indiana Housing Association and served as a director of the National Housing Association. With these groups and with much of the citizenry behind her, Bacon obtained legislative approval of an expanded housing code in 1913.

Bacon was driven by a Social Gospel concern for the poor that made it impossible for her to accept misery and waste as necessary products of urbanization and industrialization. She continued work for housing reform throughout her life, believing that existing laws would be effectively enforced only if the public supported them. She participated in other related causes, serving as head of the Indiana Child Welfare Association’s executive committee and with other agencies.

When sixty-eight years old, she died in Evansville from heart disease and was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery.

Bacon provided an account of her work in Beauty for Ashes (1914). She also wrote many pamphlets and articles on housing, a book of poems (Songs Ysame, coauthored with her sister Annie Fellows in 1897), several religious volumes, among them The Soldiers’ Book of Worship (1917) and The Path to God (1928), as well as several pageants.

For biographical material see Notable American Women (1971); H. C. Bennett, American Women in Civic Work (1915); and Who Was Who in America (1942).